Secret Russian Unit "Center 795" Planned Assassinations Across Europe, Google Translate Blew Their Cover

• A Russian national wanted by Interpol was arrested at Bogotá airport for allegedly commissioning a Serbian operative to kill two prominent European dissidents
• The conspirators' reliance on Google Translate left a recoverable digital trail that helped expose the operation
• Sweden's security service SÄPO has already identified Russia's escalating espionage and sabotage campaign as a top-tier threat to the Nordic region
• The Nordics host large communities of Russian and Belarusian dissidents — raising the question of whether any Nordic-based individuals appeared on Center 795's target list

A secret Russian unit designated "Center 795" has been tasked with planning assassinations and kidnappings of opposition figures across Europe, Sveriges Radio Ekot reports, citing intelligence material. A Russian man wanted by Interpol was arrested at Bogotá's El Dorado airport on suspicion of commissioning a Serbian operative to eliminate two well-known dissidents based in Europe. The operation collapsed because the conspirators communicated through Google Translate — the machine-generated messages left a digital trail that investigators could reconstruct.

The existence of a dedicated unit for extraterritorial killings marks an escalation from Russia's already well-documented pattern of targeting defectors and critics abroad. The poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018 and the assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in 2019 were attributed to GRU military intelligence operatives acting on specific orders. Center 795 suggests something more systematic: a standing capability for planning and executing hits on European soil, with outsourced execution through intermediaries — in this case, a Serbian national — to create deniability layers between the Kremlin and the trigger.

For the Nordic countries, the implications are direct. Sweden, Finland, and Norway host substantial communities of Russian, Belarusian, Chechen, and other Eastern European dissidents — journalists, activists, and former officials who left Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine accelerated the Kremlin's crackdown on internal opposition. SÄPO, Sweden's security service, named Russia's intensifying intelligence operations — encompassing espionage, sabotage, and influence campaigns — as the most serious state-level threat to Swedish security in its most recent assessment. Denmark's PET and Finland's Supo have issued similar warnings. None of the Nordic security services have publicly confirmed whether they were briefed on Center 795 specifically, or whether any individuals residing in the Nordic countries appeared on the unit's target list.

The Bogotá arrest also illustrates how Russia's operational reach now extends well beyond Europe. Using a Colombian transit point and a Serbian intermediary to target European-based dissidents is a multi-continent logistics chain — ambitious in scope, amateurish in execution. The Google Translate dependency is revealing: it suggests Center 795 either lacked operatives with adequate language skills for the task, or deliberately used non-Russian-speaking intermediaries to obscure the chain of command. Either way, the digital forensics were straightforward enough that the plot was intercepted before anyone was killed.

The question now facing Nordic intelligence agencies is not whether Russia runs assassination programs — that has been established — but whether the threat matrix for dissident communities in Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, and Copenhagen has been updated to reflect the existence of a dedicated planning unit. Russian intelligence has historically treated Scandinavia as a secondary theatre. The volume of Russian and Belarusian exiles who have settled in the Nordics since 2022 may have changed that calculus.

The Serbian operative allegedly recruited for the job reportedly received his instructions in mangled machine translation. The Kremlin's assassination infrastructure, it turns out, runs on the same technology as a tourist ordering lunch in a foreign restaurant.

Sources: Sveriges Radio Ekot